It is true that none of the maisons à loyer that were inserted into the empty spaces on the old patrimonial streets of Moscow as the moneyed bourgeoisie rose suddenly to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century quite equals No. 3 in extravagance and allure. Its buildings display a reckless confidence in prosperity, as though the heavy opulence of a bourgeois interior had been projected onto the façades, flagrant and over-ripe, inviting violation. The architect, Alexander Meisner, a native of Novgorod and member of the conservationist Archaeological Society, was one of the most prestigious in Moscow. Meisner worked for the Sheremetevs on another Moscow property, and in 1903 remodelled the façade and interiors of the late eighteenth-century Noblemen’s Club, an assembly for the aristocracy close to Red Square, adding a third storey. In his design for No. 3, Meisner gave grand emphasis to the front entrances and staircases, which have an aristocratic air of ceremony. In the density of its textures and the fluidity of its ornamentation, both inside and out, the style of the house is more Viennese moderne than Parisian belle époque. Yet in the way that it sinks back from the street behind ornate iron railings into a deep and shaded courtyard, the house manifests an indulgence in the superfluity of space that is peculiarly Russian.
Reilly moved about Moscow on false papers as ‘Relinsky of the Cheka’, or Mr Constantine, a Greek businessman. In the first of many conspiratorial set-pieces in his memoir, narrated with an eye to the stock gestures of his calling, the ‘legendary master spy’ turns round on ‘Cheremeteff’ to check that nobody is in the street. Unobserved he slips into No. 3, and ascends the ‘abominably stinking’ staircase. The building is ‘deathly silent’. He stops at a door, listens, looks up and down the stairs. He knocks. The door opens half an inch. ‘Is that you, Dagmara?’ There comes the sound of a chain being removed, the door opens, and the agent slips in: ‘M. Constantine, Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service in Soviet Russia’.
Days before the planned coup d’état, the plot was exposed. A failed assassination attempt on Lenin at the end of August was followed by mass arrests, summary executions and an intensification of class war in Moscow’s grandest apartment buildings. In a routine raid on the apartment of ‘Reilly’s girls’ the secret police stumbled on the conspiracy, so it is said. When the Cheka arrived at the door, Dagmara K. later told an admiring Reilly, she grabbed a bundle of thousand-rouble notes from the bureau drawer and thrust them between her legs, keeping them in her underwear until the agents left. Otten was arrested. Maria Fride was picked up on her way upstairs with a portfolio of secret documents. For unknown reasons, Dagmara K. was spared.
Reilly was in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed in the First World War) when he saw the news of the ‘mighty English conspiracy’ in the press. ‘The name of Cheremeteff … caught my eye. For a moment the paper swam before my eyes, the walls rocked and surged towards me. The window seemed to advance and recede …’ Reilly regained his bearings and hurried to Moscow in disguise, waiting to make his escape from Russia. With his Colt in his inside pocket, ‘ready to put the last bullet into my own head, rather than fall into the hands of that scum’, he disappeared into obscure depths of the city, far from ‘Cheremeteff’, the guest of indigent enemies of the regime and understanding prostitutes in fashionable bordellos which the Cheka did not touch.
Under interrogation in the Butyrka prison, Elizaveta Otten method-acted for her life. Though she had been schooled to play in less hackneyed dramas, what Konstantin Stanislavsky would have called the ‘inner reality’ of her plight drew from her a convincing portrayal of the broken-hearted ingénue, seduced and betrayed by a double-dealing stranger. ‘From the very beginning of our acquaintance he could bind me to himself,’ she wrote in an appeal to the Red Cross. Reilly had lived with her, ‘paying court’, and she had been ‘very fond of him’. It was only at her interrogation, she claimed, that she discovered that he had been ‘foully deceiving’ her for political purposes, taking advantage of her ‘exclusively good attitude’. Like all recorded details of the plot, accounts of her incarceration vary. Reilly says that her health was gravely weakened by eight-hour cross-examinations in which she was allowed neither to eat nor to sit down. Lockhart reported that the torments devised for her were more psychologically refined. She was kept in a cell with dozens of other women, including seven who claimed to be married to Reilly. All young and beautiful, the spy’s putative wives ranged from ‘an actress’ to ‘the daughter of a concierge’, and the ‘jealousy and fighting between them had to be seen to be believed’.
At the end of November Otten appeared before a revolutionary tribunal in a mass trial of the alleged conspirators. Izvestiya dubbed them ‘dirty servants of a dirty affair’. In 1918, jurisprudence had been distilled to the single question of whether or not a given act was ‘committed with a view to restoring the oppressor class to power’. When asked to explain why she had destroyed a letter addressed to Reilly when the Cheka came to search her apartment, Otten defended her move as ‘instinctive’, quite oblivious of the interests of the oppressor class. Her performance (or if Reilly is to be believed, a fifty-thousand-rouble bribe for her ‘investigator’) gained Otten an acquittal, but her write-up in Izvestiya was ignominious. The newspaper described her as ‘a former actress of the art theatre’ and misspelled her name.
Reilly’s fascination with Napoleon was one of the only continuities in his biography. Over twenty-five years, he assembled a precious collection of books, paintings and artefacts relating to Bonaparte’s life, which financial difficulties finally obliged him to sell for near $100,000 at auction in New York in 1921. Did the sale include the snuffbox that once lay on the baccarat table at the Hunting Club on ‘Cheremeteff’?
‘The two of us could not have been called friends,’ the writer and labour-camp survivor Varlam Shalamov writes in the Gulag story ‘Dry Ration’, ‘we simply loved to remember Moscow together – her streets and her monuments, the Moscow River covered with its thin layer of oil glistening like mother-of-pearl … we were ready to talk endlessly of Moscow’. In the Gulag, talking of Moscow was one of the ways of forming bonds for prisoners, like talking about food or remembering sex and fantasising about women. Women, food, Moscow. ‘A Muscovite?’ asks the Gulag doctor Lunin in ‘Descendant of a Decembrist’. The young medical student in the story is the great-grandson of the famous rebel Mikhail Lunin, a noble hussar with an exquisite columned palace decorated with lyres on Nikitsky Boulevard, whom Pushkin called ‘a friend of Mars, Bacchus, and Venus’. ‘You know, Muscovites are a people who, more than any other, like to talk about their city – the streets, the ice rinks, the houses, the Moscow River …’ Lunin muses. He craves another educated person to talk to in the camps, so, as his eyes wander the surgeon’s shelves in search of bread, Shalamov forces himself ‘to remember Moscow’s Kitai-gorod district, and the Nikitsky Gates where the writer Andrei Sobol shot himself, where Stern shot at the German ambassador’s car … that history of Moscow’s streets which no one will ever write down’. ‘Yes, Moscow, Moscow. Tell me, how many women have you had?’ Lunin replies. Shalamov had come to the city from Vologda, to ‘seething Moscow’, to study Soviet law, in the days when Andrei Vyshinsky was expounding the new revolutionary jurisprudence that would send him to the Gulag twice for the same thought crime.